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Susie’s Assessment: Failure after Failure

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The right wing response to the Vanity Fair profile of Susie Wiles (one, two) reveals a lot about the structure of Trump’s power.

While there’s nothing surprising in the profile, Chris Whipple caught Wiles admitting to failures those of outside the White House bubble all recognize, or making laughably false claims to cover them up. And while mostly the response to the profile has been a typical beltway feeding frenzy, much of the focus has been on those expressions of truth or false claims, including how some of them — Wiles’ claims that Trump was targeting Letitia James, her confession that Trump is seeking regime change in Venezuela, Trump’s awareness that Putin wants all of Ukraine — could have lasting legal and political repercussions.

Not so the right wing, though. Theirs has been a two-fold response: first, declaring not that the profile got anything wrong, much less made up any of the abundant direct quotes, but instead that they remain loyal to Susie Wiles. After everyone had performed their expression of loyalty, the right wing turned to complaining that photographer Christopher Anderson captured Trump’s aides’ ugliness and warts.

Behind those expressions of loyalty and vanity complaints, however, the profile includes a string of confessions that Trump, that Susie Wiles, that they all have failed.

Circling the motherfucking wagons

The immediate response was a performance of loyalty. First Wiles claimed in a (for her) very rare tweet that the profile had taken things out of context and ignored positive things she said. Then one after another Trump loyalist RTed that tweet and testified to how great she is and how loyal they are to her or she is to Trump.

The loyalty oaths were particularly amusing to watch through Chris LaCivita’s eyes. First he RTed Wiles’ tweet.

Then he tried to distract with yesterday’s scandal.

Then he posted one…

After another declaration of loyalty to Wiles. This Don Jr tweet — “When others cowered, she stood strong” is quite long and amusing in the original.

Scott Bessent’s claim of inaccuracy is especially notable given how Wiles described half of Trump’s advisors to be opposed to Trump’s tariffs (as I’ll show below).

LaCivita thought dumb boomerang memes would be persuasive.

More celebration of blind loyalty.

Failures hailing her role in their failure.

All leading up to this tweet, from the lady who used to pretend to be objective but now works with the former Trump spox who tried to hide behind the shrubbery, once.

Rachael Bade really did claim it was a big scoop to describe a “Wiles loyalist and Trump ally” explaining what was visible on Xitter for all to see as “circling the motherfucking wagons.”

Sure. It’s clear that’s what you were doing. But honestly, a good many people who read the profiles weren’t seeking to split the White House, they were seeking to understand what Trump’s low-key Chief of Staff does or thinks.

The loyalty that prevents you from seeing the failures she confessed doesn’t prevent us from seeing them.

Karoline Leavitt’s nasty gender-affirming care

Then people started complaining about the photography, particular a picture that revealed the slop on Karoline Leavitt’s face and the injection marks in her lips.

WaPo did a great interview with the photographer, Christopher Anderson, where he explained his view of photojournalism and truth.

I want to talk to you about the portraits that you did for Vanity Fair. As I assume you have heard, they’ve caused a bit of a splash on social media. Can you tell me how you conceived of them?

I conceived of it many years ago. I did a whole book of American politics called “Stump” (2014), where I did all close-ups. It was my attempt to circumnavigate the stage-managed image of politics and cut through the image that the public relations team wants to be presented, and get at something that feels more revealing about the theater of politics. It’s something I’ve been doing for a long time. I have done it to all sides of the political spectrum, not just Republicans. It’s part of how I think about portraiture in a lot of ways: close, intimate, revealing.

[snip]

The images are really arresting. What is your response to people who say that these images are unfair? There’s been a lot of attention about Karoline Leavitt’s lips and [what appear to be] injection sites.

I didn’t put the injection sites on her. People seem to be shocked that I didn’t use Photoshop to retouch out blemishes and her injection marks. I find it shocking that someone would expect me to retouch out those things.

[snip]

Were they coming camera-ready, or was there a hair-and-makeup team?

Most of them came camera-ready or with their own hair-and-makeup team. Karoline Leavitt has her own personal groomer that was there.

I mean, we don’t know if Karoline Leavitt still has that groomer today now that the photos are published.

Well, what can I say? That’s the makeup that she puts on, those are the injections she gave herself. If they show up in a photo, what do you want me to say? I don’t know if it says something about the world we live in, the age of Photoshop, the age of AI filters on your Instagram, but the fact that the internet is freaking out because they’re seeing real photos and not retouched ones says something to me.

Click through for the great quote about Stephen Miller’s plea for kindness.

The self-deceptions and truths from within the bubble

But none of this pushback — none of it — claims that lifelong chronicler of Chiefs of Staff Chris Whipple ever made up a quote.

Accordingly, that means no one has disputed Wiles’ admission that Trump’s policies have largely failed.

Here’s how Whipple summarized Trump’s term so far, close to the beginning of part one:

It’s been a busy year. Trump and his team have expanded the limits of presidential power, unilaterally declared war on drug cartels, imposed tariffs according to whim, sealed the southern border, achieved a ceasefire and hostage release in Gaza, and pressured NATO allies into increasing their defense spending.

At the same time, Trump has waged war on his political enemies; pardoned the January 6 rioters, firing nearly everyone involved in their investigation and prosecution; sued media companies into multimillion-dollar settlements; indicted multiple government officials he perceives as his foes; and pressured universities to toe his line. He’s redefined the way presidents behave—verbally abusing women, minorities, and almost anyone who offends him. Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September turbocharged Trump’s campaign of revenge and retribution. Critics have compared this moment to a Reichstag fire, a modern version of Hitler’s exploitation of the torching of Berlin’s parliament.

How he tells this story — though Wiles’ own assessments of Trump’s success or failure — is more interesting. The following, save the last one, are presented in the order Whipple addresses them in the profile.

End the congressional filibuster and remove Nicolás Maduro from power. [A November portrayal; results still TBD]

The agenda was twofold: ending the congressional filibuster and forcing Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power.

Pardon just those who were January 6 “happenstancers.” [Wiles lies to cover up her failure to achieve this goal]

Wiles explained: “In every case, of the ones he was looking at, in every case, they had already served more time than the sentencing guidelines would have suggested. So given that, I sort of got on board.” (According to court records, many of the January 6 rioters pardoned by Trump had received sentences that were lighter than the guidelines.) “There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” Wiles said. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”

Preserve parts of USAID. [Complete failure, but one Marco Rubio is lying about]

Musk forged ahead—all throttle, no brake. “Elon’s attitude is you have to get it done fast. If you’re an incrementalist, you just won’t get your rocket to the moon,” Wiles said. “And so with that attitude, you’re going to break some china. But no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”

[snip]

Did Rubio have any regrets about the untold number of lives that PEPFAR’s evisceration might cost? “No. First of all, whoever says that, it’s just not being accurate,” he told me. “We are not eviscerating PEPFAR.

Stephen Miller’s deportation policies. [In Wiles’ estimation, a failure]

Not long after the El Salvador deportation fiasco, in Louisiana, ICE agents arrested and deported two mothers, along with their children, ages seven, four, and two, to Honduras. The children were US citizens and the four-year-old was being treated for stage 4 cancer. Wiles couldn’t explain it.

“It could be an overzealous Border Patrol agent, I don’t know,” she said of the case, in which both mothers had reportedly been arrested after voluntarily attending routine immigration meetings. “I can’t understand how you make that mistake, but somebody did.”

Tariffs. [Wiles failed to prevent Trump’s worst instincts and the results have been worse than she imagined]

Wiles believed a middle ground on tariffs would ultimately succeed, she said, “but it’s been more painful than I expected.”

Invading blue cities. [Wiles says Trump won’t do this to stay in power]

Will the president use the military to suppress or even prevent voting during the midterms and beyond?

“I say it is categorically false, will not happen, it’s just wrongheaded,” she snapped.

November’s election. [Wiles knew they were in trouble, but even so was overoptimistic]

Wiles thought the GOP had a chance of electing the governor in New Jersey, but she knew they were in for a tough night.

The Epstein files. [Trump and Kash, both lying about what was in the files but that’s okay because MAGAts aren’t obsessed with Epstein]

For years, Kash has been saying, ‘Got to release the files, got to release the files.’ And he’s been saying that with a view of what he thought was in these files that turns out not to be right.”

[snip]

Wiles said. “It’s the Joe Rogan listeners. It’s the people that are sort of new to our world. It’s not the MAGA base.”

Murderboats and frivolous wars. [Pure self-deception]

“Not that he wanted to kill people necessarily, but stopping the killing wasn’t his first thought. It’s his first and last thought now.”

[snip]

“He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”

Russian peace efforts. [Wiles says they’re lying about Russia wanting peace]

Trump’s team was divided on whether Putin’s goal was anything less than a complete Russian takeover of Ukraine. “The experts think that if he could get the rest of Donetsk, then he would be happy,” Wiles told me in August. But privately, Trump wasn’t buying it—he didn’t believe Putin wanted peace. “Donald Trump thinks he wants the whole country,” Wiles told me.

In October I asked Rubio if that was true. “There are offers on the table right now to basically stop this war at its current lines of contact, okay?” he said. “Which include substantial parts of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which they’ve controlled since 2014. And the Russians continue to turn it down. And so…you do start to wonder, well, maybe what this guy wants is the entire country.” (In Wiles’s office is a photograph of Trump and Putin standing together, signed by Trump: “TO SUSIE YOU ARE THE GREATEST! DONALD.”)

Trump would only spend 90 days on retribution. [Wiles is in denial]

“Yes, I do,” she’d replied. “We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over.”

In late August, I asked Wiles: “Remember when you said to me months ago that Trump promised to end the revenge and retribution tour after 90 days?”

“I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour,” she said.

Trump’s biggest accomplishments: Peace and the Big Ugly

“I think the country is beginning to see that he’s proud to be an agent of peace. I think that surprises people. Doesn’t surprise me, but it doesn’t fit with the Donald Trump people think they know. I think this legislation [the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill], which funded the entire domestic agenda, is a huge accomplishment. And even though it isn’t popular in total, the component parts of it are. And that will be a very big deal in the midterms.”

That is, like the Epstein scandal more generally, Wiles either invents bubble-wrapped fictions about Trump’s own success, or concedes she, or Trump, has failed.

But Trump’s aides — the people complicit in this failure — don’t care.

They’re just going to circle the motherfucking wagons and demand loyalty.

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Donald Trump Is Getting a Pass for His Catastrophic Trade War

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WSJ had a heavily-produced story on Sunday, “Why Everyone Got Trump’s Tariffs Wrong,” purporting to assess the claims that Trump and economists had made … at some point about his tariffs.

This table includes the six allegedly competing claims WSJ assesses; I’ve added a check marking whichever side WSJ claimed was really right.

For most of six paired predictions, WSJ makes a show of adjudicating who was right, giving Trump credit on two predictions and less ostentatiously confirming economists’ predictions on three.

For example, WSJ provides this table purporting to show that both Trump and the economists were wrong about inflation (with steeper tables showing the spike in coffee and appliances); for some reason, WSJ indexes this to January 1, 2024 prices, not 2025 (and some of the tables at WSJ’s source show steeper spikes).

WSJ judges that economists were wrong this way:

Tariffs swiftly hit Americans’ wallets as major retailers from Macy’s to Best Buy raised prices in response to the duties.

“The magnitude and speed at which these prices are coming to us is somewhat unprecedented in history,” Walmart Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey told The Wall Street Journal in May.

But the worst inflation fears haven’t come to pass. Inflation has for months hovered around 3%—higher than the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, though still lower than many economists’ expectations.

But starting in the very next paragraph, WSJ explains why inflation wasn’t as bad as predicted: first, because Trump reversed the worst tariffs. Then, because companies are still trying to figure out what the fuck his tariff policy will be, especially after the Supreme Court gets done with it, and so haven’t passed on all of the tariffs, which they will eventually do.

Another factor at play: Trump’s repeated policy shifts on tariffs.

Many companies have said they want to see where tariffs will ultimately settle before introducing more price changes. The still-undecided Supreme Court case on Trump’s authority to impose tariffs gives them another reason to wait a bit longer.

Economists predict higher prices as companies draw down on their pre-tariffed inventory and renegotiate contracts with retailers and distributors.

If no new tariffs are announced, the Fed estimates the current ones will take nine months to work their way through the economy. That could push inflation from goods down in the back half of 2026. But “we haven’t been able to predict this with any precision,” said Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. “No one is.”

The rest of the article has similar equivocations. WSJ returns to Trump’s decision to reverse many of the tariffs when discussing the GDP growth (and notes that AI has kept the GDP afloat, without also noting that it’s likely in a bubble that is beginning to crash).

Trump has also walked back and delayed many of his threatened duties.

WSJ’s discussion of Trump’s failure to bring manufacturing back returns to changing policy.

Big projects will likely take years to materialize, if they happen at all, as government policies could shift again in that time.

And the flux makes this assessment impossible. Two days ago, for example, WSJ hailed September’s good job’s report.

The U.S. added 119,000 jobs in September, far more than economists had expected. But the figure was an outlier from previous months, in which job growth had lagged. As of September, the unemployment rate reached 4.4%, the highest in four years.

But that got revised downward today and — Justin Wolfers describes in reading today’s report — in reality there may be zero or negative job growth since Trump tried to impose his big tariffs, which if that proves true, would vindicate the economists.

WSJ gives Trump credit for predicting some revenue growth even while noting he wildly exaggerated how much growth there might be, but then admits that not only will much of the revenue go away if SCOTUS throws out the tariffs, but Trump would have to pay some portion — potentially as much as half — of the tariffs back.

Future collections hang on the Supreme Court’s decision on Trump’s authority to impose the tariffs, expected in coming days.

If the court strikes down tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, monthly revenue collected would fall by more than half. More than $100 billion already collected might also need to be refunded.

And WSJ also notes that a lot of the data it would need to measure all this is delayed (it doesn’t address Trump’s efforts to tamper with the data).

Perhaps the most salient assessment in the story is the last line: “As long as Trump continues to surprise the market with tariffs, trade will remain volatile,” which is both a platitude and an observation that you can’t assess many of these claims using regular measures, because the tariffs are not (or not just) about creating a precondition to shift trade flows.

Trump’s tariffs aren’t just tariffs. They are week-to-week business uncertainty.

They are also, just as importantly, about giving Trump a tool to attempt to leverage power, something captured in a different WSJ story, this interview with Meredith McGraw, in which Trump offers word salad to explain why tariffs are so cool.

When asked if he has alternative ways to use tariffs, the president said there are other laws but they are not as “nimble, not as quick.” He added, “I can do other things, but it’s not as fast. It’s not as good for national security.”

Trump also argued that tariffs gave him leverage in negotiations with other countries.

“I just used tariffs 10 minutes ago, just before you came, to settle the new inflammation that took place with Thailand and Cambodia,” Trump said. “And I told them, ‘If you have the war, not only am I going to break the trade deal we have, but I’m going to put tariffs on your country.’” He added, “Nobody can do that but me.”

“Nobody can do that but me,” Trump said of an authority that SCOTUS is likely to say he cannot lawfully do.

Worse, Trump equates being able to coerce other countries nimbly with national security. But it is anything but.

Consider how inconsistent Trump’s logic is. In the same week that Trump approved the sale of Nvidia chips to China (which chips China promptly said they would limit use), chips that remained, that very day, illegal to ship to China, the White House halted negotiations on similar kinds of technology with the UK because the Brits would not bow to Trump’s demands on food and tech standards. Trump wants to send chips to China instead of (just) shitty chicken, but he won’t send chips to the UK unless they accept US shitty chicken and Nazi Xitter posts.

None of it makes sense.

And this misrepresentation of how Trump is using tariffs — treating as sincere his false claims about how he claims he is using them — is just part of the reason why the reporting on Trump’s catastrophic tariffs has been so shitty.

To be sure, there has been persistent reporting on how badly his tariffs have devastated farm markets, especially soybeans but now shifting to wheat. There have been stories on how China has gotten pretty much what it has wanted. But there has been less coverage of how Trump’s stupid ass trade war — and China’s preparation for it since Trump’s last Administration — has created the opportunity for China to leverage its rare earth dominance and soybean consumption to bring Trump to heel.

Trump thought America was the irreplaceable market, and attempted to leverage access to it accordingly. But as he has discovered how little of all that he understands, it has backfired, giving China leverage it otherwise didn’t have.

And, if we can believe Vanity Fair’s profile of Susie Wiles, half of Trump’s advisors knew it wouldn’t work in real time.

“So much thinking out loud is what I would call it,” said Wiles of Trump’s chaotic tariff rollout. “There was a huge disagreement over whether [tariffs were] a good idea.” Trump’s advisers were sharply divided, some believing tariffs were a panacea and others predicting disaster. Wiles told them to get with Trump’s program. “I said, ‘This is where we’re going to end up. So figure out how you can work into what he’s already thinking.’ Well, they couldn’t get there.”

Wiles recruited Vance to help tap the brakes. “We told Donald Trump, ‘Hey, let’s not talk about tariffs today. Let’s wait until we have the team in complete unity and then we’ll do it,’ ” she said. But Trump barreled ahead, announcing sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs, from 10 to 100 percent—which triggered panic in the bond market and a sell-off of stocks. Trump paused his policy for 90 days, but by that time the president’s helter-skelter levies had given rise to the TACO chant: “Trump Always Chickens Out.”

Wiles believed a middle ground on tariffs would ultimately succeed, she said, “but it’s been more painful than I expected.”

All this is so painful not just because tariffs are a stupid policy and the way in which Trump implemented them is even stupid. It is painful because Trump has no fucking ability to discern what is good for America, and he doesn’t much care if he fucks up and destroys entire markets as a result.

And coverage of Trump’s destruction of the soybean market has not yet called out the systematic lies Republicans tell claiming Trump’s grant of $12 billion to struggling farmers is only an attempt (again) to reverse the damage he did, which will not come close to making farmers whole. Right wingers are, across the board, hailing Trump’s payoff and blaming the damage Trump did on Joe Biden … and almost no one is calling out the projection and lies.

Trump’s tariffs are a failure not just as tariffs, in fulfilling their purported purpose. But because Trump knows so little about the markets he’s trying to alter, he’s simply making the US vulnerable.

Update: Paul Krugman has more on what we learned from yesterday’s job numbers.

[T]he data show a weak labor market. Employment isn’t falling off a cliff, but job growth has been weak and hasn’t kept pace with the number of people seeking work. The headline unemployment rate in November was 4.6 percent, up from an average of 4 percent in 2024. That number is close to triggering the Sahm Rule, an economic rule of thumb devised by Claudia Sahm, a former economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, that has historically been highly successful at identifying the early stages of a recession.

We can’t do a strict application of the Sahm Rule yet because Sahm’s method is based on the average unemployment rate over the past three months. Unfortunately, the shutdown prevented the Bureau of Labor Statistics from collecting key data in October. But if we do an interpolation of October’s unemployment rate by averaging over September’s rate of 4.4% and November’s rate of 4.6%, we can estimate that October’s unemployment rate was 4.5%. And those 3 months of unemployment numbers bring us within a whisker of the unemployment rise that, according to the Sahm Rule, signals that a recession is on the horizon.

The state of the economy looks even worse if we take a wider view of the labor market.

[snip]

Normally, when a president experiences a troubled economy during his first year he dispatches his flying monkeys minions to declare that it’s all his predecessor’s fault. And some Trump officials, like Scott Bessent, are indeed trying to play the blame game. But this standard political tactic is unlikely to work for this president.

First, the economy that Trump inherited when he took office was in much better shape than today’s economy, with lower unemployment combined with faster job growth, and inflation trending down.

Second, Trump’s radical policy changes – huge (illegal) tariffs, mass deportations, big tax cuts (for the rich), benefit cuts (for the poor and middle class), mass layoffs of federal workers, disinvesting in huge green energy projects and aid to farmers — have been clearly damaging to everything besides crypto and AI. It strains credulity – even for the Trump faithful – to claim that we are still in Joe Biden’s economy.

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The Epistemology of the Epstein Scandal

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One of the longest part of Vanity Fair’s two-part (one, two) interview with Susie Wiles focuses on Jeffrey Epstein. It goes like this:

¶1: Chris Whipple’s explanation of why it’s important.
¶2: Wiles’ admission she underestimated the import of it.
¶3: A review of Pam Bondi’s binder fiasco, with Wiles commenting on Bondi’s fuck-up.
¶4: A report on how many FBI agents reviewed the files, with Wiles’ claim they weren’t just searching for Trump.
¶5: Wiles’ claim there was nothing bad on Trump in the files, just him and Epstein being “young, single playboys.”
¶6: Wiles debunking Trump’s false claims about Clinton’s ties to Epstein.
¶7: Wiles describing that Kash Patel and Dan Bongino really understood Epstein, except Kash was wrong.
¶8: Wiles’ failure to offer an explanation for Todd Blanche’s interview with Ghislaine Maxwell.
¶9: Wiles’ claim that Trump was pissed Ghislaine got moved.
¶10: Wiles’ claim that the birthday letter to Epstein is not from Trump.
¶11 – ¶12: Wiles’ claim that Trump would sit for a deposition in his WSJ lawsuit if necessary.
¶13: Whipple explaining the threat of the Epstein files again, then quoting Wiles on who cares about it.
¶14: Someone at the White House who might be JD Vance explaining who cares about it.
¶15: A specific mention of Vance, with further explanation of those who care about Epstein.

Elsewhere, Wiles credits herself with a great read of electoral outcomes (even while describing her own prediction that Jack Ciattarelli might beat Mikie Sherill last month): She was certain they would win last year, she didn’t think November would be that bad, they’re going to win midterms.

Her confidence (even if feigned) is why I’m so interested in Wiles’ description of the relative knowledge about Epstein. As noted, she admitted to Whipple that she didn’t understand how important this scandal could be, deferring knowledge on such issues to Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and JD Vance — two of whom she describes as conspiracy theorists.

Wiles told me she underestimated the potency of the scandal: “Whether he was an American CIA asset, a Mossad asset, whether all these rich, important men went to that nasty island and did unforgivable things to young girls,” she said, “I mean, I kind of knew it, but it’s never anything I paid a bit of attention to.”

[snip]

The people that really appreciated what a big deal this is are Kash [Patel] and [FBI deputy director] Dan Bongino,” she said. “Because they lived in that world. And the vice president, who’s been a conspiracy theorist for a decade…. For years, Kash has been saying, ‘Got to release the files, got to release the files.’ And he’s been saying that with a view of what he thought was in these files that turns out not to be right.” [brackets original]

But then six paragraphs after describing that longtime Trump loyalist Kash Patel was totally into [a false belief] about the Epstein files, first Wiles and then someone who might be JD Vance (who is mentioned in the following paragraph) describe their understanding of who cares about this: “people that are sort of new to our world.”

The Epstein files debacle poses a dire political threat to Trump and the future of the GOP. “The people that are inordinately interested in Epstein are the new members of the Trump coalition, the people that I think about all the time—because I want to make sure that they are not Trump voters, they’re Republican voters,” Wiles said. “It’s the Joe Rogan listeners. It’s the people that are sort of new to our world. It’s not the MAGA base.”

A senior White House official described the mindset of an overlapping bloc of voters who are angered by both Trump’s handling of the Epstein files and the war in Gaza. It’s as much as 5 percent of the vote and includes “union members, the podcast crowd, the young people, the young Black males. They are interested in Epstein. And they are the people that are disturbed that we are as cozy with Israel as we are.”

Susie Wiles, who has been around Trump since he was first elected, claims “the people that are inordinately interested in Epstein” are “not the MAGA base”!!!

And then that anonymous White House official who might be JD Vance (whom Wiles explains is a conspiracy theorist) describes that the “young Black males” are the ones who care about Epstein.

To be fair, it is the case that the MAGAt base voters who do care deeply about this — people like Charlie Kirk, Benny Johnson, and Jack Posobiec — quickly fell in line when Trump demanded they stop talking about Epstein in July.

But like Kash and Bongino themselves, these are the people who made Epstein specifically and conspiracy theories about pedophiles more generally some of the central glue of  Trump’s coalition.

As I wrote for TPM’s anniversary series, the superpower of reclaiming attention which Trump has honed with these same far right trolls has always been developed in parallel with the use of conspiracy theories about pedophilia — from Posobiec’s Pizzagate, to QAnon, to Epstein — to keep that attention.

On July 8, something happened to Donald Trump that I’ve not seen happen in the entire decade he has dominated presidential politics. As his base clamored for more disclosures about sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, his superpower — his ability to grab and redirect attention — briefly failed him. “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” he whined when a journalist asked about the Justice Department’s decision to abort any further disclosure of documents related to the case. “This guy’s been talked about for years.”

[snip]

Two things had disrupted Trump’s superpower. First, after Trump’s top DOJ appointees — Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and his deputy Dan Bongino – had fueled, then disappointed, MAGA’s demand for Epstein disclosures, the failure to fulfill their promises fed the conspiracy itself. By thwarting the conspiracists’ demands, Bondi, especially, created rifts and distrust in Trump’s own base.

Conspiracy theories about Epstein were always non-falsifiable; the mob will never be satisfied. But Bondi made that dynamic worse.

More important for understanding what happened in July: the very same online trolls who’ve been critical partners in Trump’s success managing attention were precisely the same people who had spun those conspiracy theories. There is a direct through-line from a relatively small set of social media accounts that helped Trump win the 2016 election to PizzaGate and, after that, QAnon. QAnoners played a key role in Trump’s 2021 insurrection attempt, and its adherents remain a substantial portion of Trump’s base. Since 2016, pro-Trump trolls’ exploitation of social media algorithms to redirect political news coverage — whether from legacy media or newer outlets — has disrupted traditional news cycles.

And while some of what Wiles says about Epstein — her claim Trump was pissed Ghislaine got moved, her feigned certainty that the birthday letter is not from Trump — is clearly bullshit, Wiles and the anonymous person who might be JD nevertheless offered a very specific, and very inaccurate, description of which Trump voters care about Epstein.

Maybe they’re telling this tale because it’s the same thing they told House members in a bid to kill the Massie-Khanna discharge petition. Maybe they’re telling this tale because everyone Wiles thinks knows about Epstein is a conspiracy theorist and the guy who really knows is just a former young playboy.

But even though Trump got Kirk and Benny and Posobiec to give up their sustained demand for Epstein materials, it remains the case that Trump has never fully recovered from the fiasco in July. First Mike Johnson had to flee a week early in July or risk embarrassing votes, then Bondi’s desperate bid — using the White House situation room — to convince Lauren Boebert to defect from the discharge petition backfired, then the Epstein fiasco ultimately led Marjorie Taylor Greene to break with Trump more substantially.

And tomorrow, DOJ will be forced to hand over the Epstein files themselves.

For five months, Epstein has remained at least a low-level burn undermining Trump’s ability to manage the public’s focus and his own policy goals. The Epstein thing was the first thing that led Republicans to defect, and now they’re defecting left and right.

And yet Wiles (and her anonymous friend who might be conspiracy theorist JD Vance) professes to believe the only people who care about Epstein are the young Black voters that Trump just won over last year?

That’s either a fantastic lie. Or a confession that explains far more about why Trump has bolloxed Epstein so badly.

Update: On Xitter, Liz Wheeler (no known relation), one of the recipients of Bondi’s binder, focuses on the same passages I did — blaming Wiles for misinforming Trump about how important this is to MAGAts. But she doesn’t note what I do: that Wiles, at least, is still unclear how important it is.

It now makes total sense as to why President Trump has—at times—dismissed the Epstein scandal and even called it a “hoax.” Over the summer, Trump said he did not understand why many of his supporters were so fixated on Epstein.

Well, now why know why he said that—it would seem Susie Wiles was the one misinforming Trump about the MAGA base’s concerns.

We care about the Epstein files because we want transparency, we want the elites held accountable, and we want JUSTICE for the Epstein victims.

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John Thune’s Flopsweat about Funding Stephen Miller’s Gulag

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Amid all the warmongering last week, there was an interesting head fake in the Senate.

On Tuesday, JD Vance went to a Senate lunch (rather than the Situation Room meeting on Iran) at which he told them the deadline for passing was the August recess — starting August 4.

On Wednesday, Susie Wiles went for a very short visit to the Senate to order them to get the whole thing done by July 4.

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles is encouraging Congress to get the “big, beautiful bill” to President Donald Trump’s desk by July 4.

Wiles told GOP senators at a closed-door lunch that the Independence Day deadline still holds as far as Trump is concerned, according to a person granted anonymity to describe the private meeting.

I started to write a long post (piggybacking on this one) about how the various timelines — the legal responses to Trump’s abuses and the economic impact of his disastrous policy choices — might make it harder to codify key parts of his abuses in law with the Big Ugly reconciliation bill. I was going to lay out how recent developments (this was so long ago I surmised that Trump’s Iran warmongering might cause him some political headaches and now … here we are, Trump talking regime change in the wake of an inconclusive illegal strike) might exacerbate the way his legislative agenda might be Overtaken By Events.

That post got Overtaken By Events.

The punch line of my original post was going to be an argument that Wiles was pushing the Senate to hurry up not because impending financial doom might make passing the Big Ugly harder, nor because the debt ceiling is approaching.

Rather, Kristi Noem is burning through cash.

President Trump’s immigration crackdown is burning through cash so quickly that the agency charged with arresting, detaining and removing unauthorized immigrants could run out of money next month.

Why it matters: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is already $1 billionover budget by one estimate, with more than three months left in the fiscal year. That’s alarmed lawmakers in both parties — and raised the possibility of Trump clawing funds from agencies to feed ICE.

  • Lawmakers say ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is at risk of violating U.S. law if it continues to spend at its current pace.
  • That’s added urgency to calls for Congress to pass Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which could direct an extra $75 billion or so to ICE over the next five years.
  • It’s also led some lawmakers to accuse DHS and ICE of wasting money. “Trump’s DHS is spending like drunken sailors,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the DHS appropriations subcommittee.

Zoom in: ICE’s funding crisis is being fueled by Trump’s team demanding that agents arrest 3,000 immigrants a day — an unprecedented pace ICE is still trying to reach.

This creates the possibility for a slew of legal challenges to Stephen Miller’s dragnet, both from those targeted in it challenging the legality of spending money to target them in the first place, but also from opponents who can start suing Trump for breaking the law by spending money that was not appropriated.

The dragnet is at somewhat-imminent risk of becoming an illegal use of funds.

And that comes as a few Republicans — most loudly, Rand Paul, who was bypassed as Chair for the Senate language on homeland security funding — start raising questions about why we need to blow so much money if Miller has already shut down the border.

Sen. Rand Paul is a frequent thorn in GOP leadership’s side. But his recent break over border security funding in President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” has top Republicans pushing the bounds of institutional norms to rein him in.

Senior Republicans have sidelined the Kentucky Republican, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, in their talks with the White House over policies under the panel’s purview.

Budget Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told POLITICO he has taken over as the lead negotiator around how to shepherd through tens of billions of dollars for border wall construction and related infrastructure in the GOP megabill. Meanwhile, a Senate Republican aide said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) — who heads the relevant Homeland Security subcommittee — will be the point person for negotiating the bill’s government affairs provisions.

With every other committee chair helping manage negotiations for their panels’ portions of the massive tax and spending package, cutting Paul out is unprecedented. But Paul proposed funding border security at a fraction of what the administration requested and the House passed in its bill.

I’ve long been tracking conflict among Republicans over the financial parts of the Big Ugly. But even as Trump’s polling turns south on Miller’s gulag, the huge funding package for it is creating some headaches for the must-pass reconciliation bill.

In an op-ed in Fox News today (accompanied by live Fox News pressure), John Thune gives up the game.

He argues that Republicans have to get the bill done by July 4 — Susie Wiles’ deadline, not JD’s. And his argument focuses primarily on the immigration funding (but also Golden Dome, which Mark Kelly recently exposed as an impossible boondoggle).

In large part, this bill is the culmination of President Trump’s campaign promises and the promises that Republican senators have made to our voters. Chief among them is keeping the American people safe through strong border security and a military strong enough to deter threats and conflicts around the world before they begin.

President Trump has achieved remarkable success in ending the Biden border crisis and removing the criminal illegal aliens that President Biden let walk into our country – but it hasn’t been cheap, and the administration has told us that resources are running out. This bill will fully fund the border wall and President Trump’s successful policies for the entirety of his presidency, removing any possibility that Democrats will hold those resources hostage to try to increase other government spending.

This same principle also applies to defense funding. Recent conflicts around the world should make clear the need to have a modern and lethal fighting force that can keep the American people safe. This means smart, generational investments like President Trump’s Golden Dome for America to defend against advanced drones, missiles, and hypersonics, as well as prioritizing building new ships and unmanned vehicles.

A nation cannot prosper unless it is secure, and with our borders and defense capabilities bolstered, the next key pillar of this bill is creating prosperity in America.

[snip]

Senators have worked to develop this bill for well over a year now. Now it is time to act. Border resources are drying up. National security needs have never been more apparent. And with each passing day, we move closer to reaching both our nation’s debt limit and the largest-ever tax increase on the American people.

Senators return to Washington today and we will remain here until this bill is passed. We know that Democrats will fearmonger and misrepresent our efforts, and we expect them to drag this debate long into the night with unrelated issues. However, I am confident we will get this bill across the finish line. [my emphasis]

It may not be just the burn rate of Noem’s spending spree.

That is, Noem is blowing through cash and the result of it is horrible images of American citizens being assaulted by masked goons. Noem is blowing through cash and businessmen in all sorts of industries are discovering that their businesses will suffer. Noem is blowing through cash and everyone is talking about how terrible the consequences of Miller’s demand for 3,000 bodies a day is.

Noem is blowing through cash and the issue of immigration is becoming a liability, not Trump’s biggest advantage.

And so Thune will attempt to do Susie Wiles’ bidding to get the dragnet funded before it’s too late.

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Seven Reasons Trump’s Entire National Security Team Should Resign in Disgrace

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The White House, with the help of Politico, is trying to make National Security Adviser Mike Waltz the fall guy for adding Atlantic editor Jeff Goldberg to the Signal thread on which they planned war strikes against Yemen.

Nothing is decided yet, and White House officials cautioned that President Donald Trump would ultimately make the decision over the next day or two as he watches coverage of the embarrassing episode.

A senior administration official told POLITICO on Monday afternoon that they are involved in multiple text threads with other administration staffers on what to do with Waltz, following the bombshell report that the top aide inadvertently included Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg in a private chat discussing a military strike on Houthis.

“Half of them saying he’s never going to survive or shouldn’t survive,” said the official, who like others was granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberation. And two high-level White House aides have floated the idea that Waltz should resign in order to prevent the president from being put in a “bad position.”

“It was reckless not to check who was on the thread. It was reckless to be having that conversation on Signal. You can’t have recklessness as the national security adviser,” the official said.

Mind you, the knives have been out for Waltz already, and the notion that he was in touch with a Neocon journalist like Goldberg would only help those already trying to oust Waltz make the case that he’s not on Trump’s America First agenda.

And Politico doesn’t mention whether its sources were also on the Signal thread, and whether their discussions about making Waltz take the fall were done on Signal.

It is a transparent attempt to make a major breach — potentially a crime — into something else, the forgivable error of adding the wrong person to a chat thread.

This cover story, that this is just a reckless mistake about adding the wrong person to a Signal thread, also happens to be the line Trump’s closest allies in the Senate and the few Fox News hosts Trump hasn’t already hired into his Administration are parroting on TV.

1. Waltz set up a Signal chat to make war plans without verifying the ID of those included

To be sure, it was pretty boneheaded that Waltz didn’t better verify the people he was first adding to Signal and then putting on a “principles [sic] group” to plan war strikes.

On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz. I have met him in the past, and though I didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me, I did think it somewhat unusual, given the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with journalists—and Trump’s periodic fixation on me specifically. It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me.

[snip]

Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”

A message to the group, from “Michael Waltz,” read as follows: “Team – establishing a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours. My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items and will be sending that out later this evening.”

Note, at about the time Waltz made this list, 11:28 PM Moscow time, list member Steve Witkoff was meeting with Putin, after having been left waiting for hours.

So yeah, Trump’s National Security Adviser exercised little diligence about how he set up a list to carry on highly classified conversations involving people’s cell phones, including cell phones that might be in Russia.

2. The entire national security team participated in a potential violation of the Espionage Act

But the effort to claim this is just a mistake in the creation of the Signal list is an attempt to downplay that Trump’s CIA Director, John Ratcliffe, sent the identity of a currently serving intelligence officer and later sent what appears to be sources and methods on Signal, and then his Secretary of Defense, Whiskey Pete Hegseth, sent operational details of the imminent strikes on Yemen on Signal, and then Waltz himself sent out what sound like the immediate results of the operation, also on Signal.

All those men, who loudly condemned Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden for their unintentional mishandling of classified information, who demanded that DOJ prosecute such lapses, sent information on an insecure chat that happened to include a journalist.

18 USC 793(f) makes it a crime to so negligently mishandle National Defense Information that someone not authorized to receive it does receive it.

(f) Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer—

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

And yet Trump’s entire national security team — not only his National Security Adviser and his CIA Director and his Secretary of Defense, but also his Chief of Staff, his Secretary of State, his Vice President, his Director of National Intelligence, and others — did nothing as the entire team shared information about an upcoming and recently completed military attack, on Signal.

The entire gang was in on it.

3. [Trump claims] his entire national security team may have committed a crime and also an embarrassing story was about to break but no one told him

When Trump was first asked about the story, he played dumb, claiming he didn’t know anything about it.

I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me it’s a magazine that’s going out of business. But I know nothing about it. You’re saying that they had what?

Sure, this is almost certainly a lie. Goldberg says he told the White House about it at 9AM yesterday morning.

But now that Trump has told the lie, he has also claimed that after his entire national security team learned that a journalist may have witnessed them engage in behavior that might violate the Espionage Act, none of them told him — not JD Vance, not Mike Waltz, not Susie Wiles, not the NSC spox who gave on the record confirmation that the thread was authentic — none of them alerted Trump to the breach. Trump would further have you believe that none of them told him — not JD Vance, not Mike Waltz, not Susie Wiles, not the NSC spox who gave on the record confirmation that the thread was authentic — that an incredibly damaging story was about to drop.

If that were true it would mean Trump could trust no one to keep him informed of the most basic things. It would mean his entire national security team fucked up and kept it a secret from him.

4. DOD attacked a foreign country based on Stephen Miller’s feels of Trump’s intent

One weird line in the Atlantic story describes how Stephen Miller (Trump’s domestic policy advisor, not formally on his foreign policy team) interpreted Trump’s views from a prior meeting in the Situation Room, and Miller’s interpretation was all it took to affirm Trump’s intent to launch strikes on Yemen.

At this point, the previously silent “S M” joined the conversation. “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”

That message from “S M”—presumably President Trump’s confidant Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, or someone playing Stephen Miller—effectively shut down the conversation. The last text of the day came from “Pete Hegseth,” who wrote at 9:46 a.m., “Agree.”

This entire operation was — is, still — being authorized solely on Presidential authority.

But the Presidential authority, the thing that gives it some cover of law, amounts to Stephen Miller’s feels about the President’s intent.

That’s a pretty flimsy basis on which to launch military strikes.

5. Hegseth lied when caught

All this broke as Pete Hegseth was flying to Hawaii, his first trip to Asia as Defense Secretary (if he makes it that far).

When asked about sending war plans on a thread that included a journalist, Hegseth lied, claiming no one had been texting war plans. (In a truly spectacular touch, Hegseth put the video of himself lying up on his “DOD Rapid Response” Xitter account, after which it promptly got fact-checked.

I get that these underqualified right wing white men never take personal accountability for their actions.

But this undermines whatever leadership credibility Hegseth otherwise might have had.

The military requires accountability from its leaders.

Hegseth refused to take any.

6. Waltz set the threads to autodelete, likely deliberately defying the Presidential Records Act

According to Goldberg, Mike Waltz set the text threads to auto-delete.

There was another potential problem: Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.

Not only would deleting this thread without creating a record violate the Presidential and Federal Records Acts, but that’s probably why they were sending war plans on Signal.

That is, the most likely reason why Trump’s entire national security team was using an insecure platform to plan war strikes was to ensure there were no embarrassing records for posterity, a violation of the law.

7. The entire national security team may have committed a crime in plain sight but Pam Bondi and Kash Patel won’t investigate

Pam Bondi was admittedly busy yesterday making multiple TV appearances in which she scolded Jasmine Crockett for opposing Elon Musk’s efforts to dismantle the government.

In none of them did she say she was opening an investigation into whether Mike Waltz or any of the other people on the list violated the Espionage Act or any other laws.

Who are we kidding? There’s no way Bondi or Kash Patel will investigate this (though they too criticized Biden and Hillary about classified information).

And that, in and of itself, is reason why Bondi and Patel should resign in disgrace. Because even in the face of a humiliating security breach, they’ll do nothing to hold Trump’s people accountable.

Update: I watched the Threats hearing at which Tulsi and John Ratcliffe testified. Both seem to be claiming that nothing they posted was classified, but they defer to DOD regarding whether anything Whiskey Pete shared was classified. Clearly Whiskey Pete has retroactively declassified material to cover up his possible crime.

Of note, Ratcliffe did not know (and seemed surprised) that Steve Witkoff was in Russia during the period of the list. And Tulsi admitted she had been overseas during the period as well; she did a trip to the Pacific, including stops in Hawaii, Japan, Thailand, India and France.

Finally, Tulsi freely agreed to have her own use of Signal (and other encrypted apps) audited to make sure she’s not doing anything impermissible; Ratcliffe was cagier, and said only he’d do so if NSC agreed.

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Iranian Hackers Compromised Roger Stone’s Email Eight Years After Russian Hackers Exfiltrated DNC Emails

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DOJ unsealed the indictment against three Iranian hackers it accuses of targeting Donald Trump’s campaign (as well as a bunch of other victims, including one of his top State Department officials).

Perhaps the most remarkable detail is this.

On May 25, 2016, Russian hackers started exfiltrating the emails from the DNC that Trump and his rat-fucker would exploit to beat Hillary Clinton.

On May 23, 2024 — two days short of eight years, to the day — Iranian hackers first compromised one of two Roger Stone email accounts they hacked.

As noted, Trump waited to call the FBI, in part because Susie Wiles was worried the FBI would make them hand over their email server (as Hillary had done during the campaign where Trump beat her). As a result, Iranian hackers remained in the account of Victim 11 — from whom they stole the JD Vance vetting materials, among other things — for two months.

According to the indictment, Iranian hackers were in Roger Stone’s account (what must be his Hotmail account) for almost a month, from May 24 to June 20.

 

On June 15, the hackers used Roger’s account to try to hack another Trump account (probably Susie Wiles), though that failed, which may have led Microsoft to cop on, leading to the expulsion of hackers from the Hotmail account.

After they were kicked out of that account they got into his Gmail account, apparently for a day.

Now, I might allow myself to feel a touch of schadenfreude that Roger Stone has been victimized in the same kind of influence operation he exploited against Hillary.

Except for this: As I keep saying, one of the reasons this is worse — more dangerous — than what happened to Hillary is that these people are also trying to exact revenge for the killing of Qasem Soleimani. The indictment says that almost verbatim: One of the goals of this operation was to “steal information relating to current and former U.S. officials that could be used to advance the IRGC’s malign activities, including ongoing efforts to avenge the death of Qasem Soleimani.” The indictment describes that the hackers successfully targeted someone who played a key role in the Abraham Accords in Trump’s State Department, then started making travel reservations for the person using their stolen passport.

They’re not just using this information to affect the election. They’re using it to track people.

It turns out it was never fun and games.

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Trump Didn’t Call the FBI Because He Refused to Meet the Standard to Which He Held Hillary Clinton

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In a piece laying out how Trump tried to undermine rule of law with a press release stating that the former President wanted the State of Florida, not the FBI, to investigate the suspected Ryan Routh assassination, WaPo provides more explanation for why Trump’s campaign didn’t call the FBI after Microsoft or Google told them they had been hacked: Because they feared sharing their email server with the FBI.

Trump’s mistrust of federal agencies has complicated the investigation into Iran’s cyberattack on his campaign. When a technology firm first discovered the breach, campaign aides huddled to discuss what they should do. After hours of discussions in July, they decided they trusted the software experts to handle the matter and did not call the FBI. Co-campaign manager Susie Wiles, whose email account was targeted, was among those who questioned whether they could trust the Justice Department. The fears centered on giving federal officials access to campaign email servers and whether they would leak information out publicly.

Donald Trump and his Republican allies spent years spinning conspiracies off of misleading Jim Comey testimony about how the FBI conducted the investigation into the Russian hack of Hillary’s campaign, claiming that because (they claimed) FBI had not obtained Hillary’s server, any attribution to Russia must be suspect. This was a key prong of Roger Stone’s criminal defense. Republicans spent years suggesting that Hillary, a victim of a nation-state attack, somehow failed to meet the standards of responsible victim.

Yet Hillary, in 2016, was in fact situated in the place Trump claims to currently be: facing a counterintelligence investigation stemming out of a partisan witch hunt in Congress.

Hillary was, in fact, faced with the prospect of having to ask for help from the very same people who had been criminally investigating her for years.

And any precedent that information shared with the FBI would “leak” (as opposed to get shared in court filings)? Trump’s the guy who did that, leaking materials from the investigation that resulted, going so far as to prepare his entire Crossfire Hurricane binder to release to the press.

Trump did that, not the FBI.

I am genuinely sympathetic about the plight Trump faces, trying to run an election campaign while facing real threats, including assassination attempts, from a hostile foreign actor.

The ongoing burden of trying to reclaim digital security and stave off physical threats takes a lot of energy that would otherwise be focused on running a campaign.

I know that, because I’ve heard a bit about how much time Hillary’s team had to spend fighting serial hacks, all the way through election day.

But understand: This decision not to call the FBI because Susie Wiles was afraid the FBI might ask to access the compromised server, what amounts to a decision to delay taking necessary steps to try to fight back?

That decision stems from a refusal to abide by the standards Republicans have demanded of Hillary for eight years.

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In One Week, Trump Suggests He’ll Eliminate Sanctions on Iran and Lies about Iran Hack to Supporters

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Donald Trump’s batshit crazypants answer regarding childcare was the part of his address to the New York Economic Club that deservedly attracted the most attention last week.

But I was interested in a response Trump gave to Sullivan & Cromwell Rodge Cohen regarding whether he would alter the sanctions against Russia.

H. RODGIN COHEN: Thank you, Bob, and thank you, Mr. President. Thank you. I would like to ask about the United States economic sanctions programs. These programs have been used, as you well know, to advance our national security interests, our foreign policy objectives, but they also have economic implications. And the most recent was the program against Russia in response to the Ukrainian – their invasion of Ukraine, where, for once, we got the support of all our allies. So my specific question is, would you strengthen or modify any of these economic sanctions programs, particularly Russia, including the pipeline you mentioned?

DONALD TRUMP: Well, it’s a great question. The problem with what we have with sanctions – and I was a user of sanctions, but I put them on and take them off as quickly as possible because, ultimately, it kills your dollar and it kills everything the dollar represents, and we have to continue to have that be the world currency. I think it’s important. I think it would be losing a war. If we lost – if we lost the dollar as the world currency, I think that would be the equivalent of losing a war.

That would make us a third-world country, and we can’t let it happen. So I use sanctions very powerfully against countries that deserve it, and then I take them off. Because look, you’re losing Iran, you’re losing Russia, China is out there trying to get their currency to be the dominant currency, as you know better than anybody. All of these things are happening.

You’re losing so many countries because there’s so much conflict with all of these countries that you’re going to lose that, and we can’t lose that. So I want to use sanctions as little as possible. One of the things that we have with tariffs is that I’ll say to them, you don’t honor the dollar as your world currency. Is that right?

You’re not going to do it? No, we’re not. I said, that’s okay. I’m going to put tariffs all over your product, and they’re going to say, sir, we’d love to honor the dollar as the world currency.

You know, tariffs, in addition to monetary and the money that we’ll take in, which will be bigger than you’ve ever seen in this country before, gives you tremendous political power for something like that, as an example. I stopped wars with the threat of tariffs. I stopped wars with two countries that mattered a lot. A lot of people would have been killed. [my emphasis]

Cohen asked only about Russia. But Trump’s answer included Iran (and wildly misrepresented what he did with sanctions on Iran, which Biden rescinded a month after becoming President). Trump seemed to suggest that sanctions, including those against Iran, had to be limited, or targeted countries would abandon the dollar.

I’ll leave it to economic experts to address whether his plan to enforce adherence to the dollar using tariffs could have the same effect.

I’m interested in the response, generally, because if there was a quo that Trump was supposed to provide after Russia helped Trump win in 2016, it was sanctions relief. Trump went to some effort — with an attempt to script Steve Bannon’s HPSCI testimony, Don Jr’s refusal to testify before a grand jury, Trump’s complete blow-off of a sanctions question from Mueller, and the attempt to reverse the Mike Flynn prosecution — to prevent Mueller from substantiating that Trump had taken steps to deliver that quo before the Russian investigation became overt.

Yet here he is again, suggesting he’ll end sanctions on Russia during the election.

But I’m particularly interested in Trump’s affirmative inclusion of Iran in the comment.

Sure, his inclusion of Iran in this discussion might reflect his belief that Jared’s effort to spread Trumpism around the Middle East will bring Iran into the fold — or perhaps it reflects the efforts of his Russian buddies to view Iran as an ally.

But I found it interesting given that Iran not only targeted his rat-fucker and his campaign manager for hacking, but also allegedly tried to hire hitmen to assassinate him.

All the more so given how Trump lied about DOJ’s focus on Iran when he responded to DOJ’s exposure of the RT influence laundering last week at his equally batshit appearance in Mosinee, WI.

Did you see? Three days ago, it started again. The Justice Department said Russia may be involved in our elections again. You see that, Mr. Congressman, great Congressman from Texas? You see that Russia — it’s Russia. And you know? The whole world laughed at him this time, 2.5 years, not a phone call made to Russia, not anything to do with Russia but stopping their pipeline and lots of other things that people approved. And they said just the other day, the Attorney General, we are looking at Russia, and I said, oh no. It’s Russia Russia Russia all over again. But they don’t look at China and they don’t look at Iran. They look at Russia. I don’t know what it is with poor Russia. This is very, very. But you know what? Russia would have never happened if I were President, attacking Ukraine would never have happened. I knew Putin. I knew him well. And you know, he endorsed — I don’t know if you saw the other day? He endorsed Ka-Mala. He endorsed Ka-Mala. I was very offended by that. I wonder why he endorsed Ka-Mala. Now, he’s a chess player. I endorse Ka-Mala. Should I be congressman, should I be upset about that? Now, it was done with a smile — Ron? Was it done with a smile? I think it was done. Maybe with a smile. I don’t know who the hell knows. Nobody is going to figure out. There are about 19 steps ahead of us but this whole Russian thing, nobody, was tougher on Russia in history than Trump and the person that knows that better than anyone is President Vladimir Putin.

Trump acknowledged the hack at his Bedminster presser — where he also predicted “we will be friendly with Iran.”

I originally thought this response from Trump was a response to the Ukraine question, I think, instead, he was responding to the hacking question.

Can you say anything about the hacking of your campaign?

I don’t like it. Really bad. I’m not happy with it. Our government shouldn’t let that happen.

Does there need to be a government response?

Yeah there should be. Our government should not let — they have no respect for our government.

Trump blamed the government after, earlier in the Potemkin Presser, he had already predicted that “we” will be friendly with Russia’s increasingly critical ally, Iran.

We will be friendly with Iran. Maybe, maybe not. But they cannot have a nuclear weapon. We were all set to make sure they did not have a nuclear weapon.

But last week, he lied about it. He lied and suggested that DOJ would never look at Iran’s influence operations, even though the Deep State has twice done what they did last week with Russia, attribute Iran’s effort to interfere in the election, in that case by harming Trump, and do so before the Trump campaign alerted the FBI to the hack.

Trump was targeted for hacking (and, allegedly, assassination) by Iran. And yet he’s hiding that when he dismisses DOJ’s similar focus on Russian influence operations.

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Viktor Orbán’s Mar-a-Lago Field Trip

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The Atlantic has a very good piece on how Trump campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita plan to win November’s election by shifting a focus from traditional field work to (stop me if this gives you 2016 headaches) digital microtargeting.

Published as it was in the last few days, it starts by laying out the premise: Wiles and LaCivita, to the extent they were going to work, presumed that Joe Biden was the nominee.

Only one thing could disrupt that plan: a change of candidates atop the Democratic ticket.

There was always a certain danger inherent to this assault on Biden’s faculties. If Wiles and LaCivita were too successful—if too many Democrats decided, too quickly, that Biden was no longer capable of defeating Trump, much less serving another four years thereafter—then they risked losing an ideal opponent against whom their every tactical maneuver had already been deliberated, poll-tested, and prepared. Campaigns are usually on guard against peaking too soon; in this case, the risk for Trump’s team was Biden bottoming out too early.

Of course they would build a campaign against Biden. Trump has been tailoring all his electoral plans — all of them — to Joe Biden since 2018. Six years, Trump and the GOP have focused on dirtying up Joe Biden.

And they’ve had help.

In conjunction with the disruption of a Russian botnet operating on Xitter (which I may return to) on Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines issued one of the announcements that the Intelligence Community has been trying to get right since 2016: Russia, Iran, and China are playing in US electoral politics again. And Russia continues to target Joe Biden.

Russia’s efforts to influence this year’s U.S. election through information warfare have the same aim as in previous elections — to undermine President Joe Biden’s campaign and the Democratic Party and weaken public confidence in the electoral process, intelligence officials said Tuesday.

Russia’s election influence operations, which include covert social media accounts and encrypted direct messaging channels, are targeting key voter groups in swing states to exploit political divisions in the U.S. and erode support for Ukraine in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion, officials with the Office of the Director National Intelligence, or ODNI, told reporters.

Asked whether Russia’s information campaign is trying to boost or undermine one of the presidential candidates, an ODNI official said: “We have not observed a shift in Russia’s preferences for the presidential race from past elections, given the role the U.S. is playing with regard to Ukraine and broader policy toward Russia.”

Speaking without attribution, some spook further said that Russia was laundering its efforts through “influential US voices” and commercial firms.

“We are beginning to see Russia target specific voter demographics, promote divisive narratives and denigrate specific politicians. Moscow seeks to shape electoral outcomes, undermine electoral integrity and amplify domestic divisions,” the ODNI official said.

“To accomplish this, Moscow is using a variety of approaches to bolster its messaging and lend an air of authenticity to its efforts. This includes outsourcing its efforts to commercial firms to hide its hand and laundering narratives through influential U.S. voices,” the official said.

Such microtargeting of disgruntled types has a European counterpart — not just efforts to sway the various recent elections (which were wildly successful at the EU, but less so elsewhere), but also recruiting people to engage in sabotage.

A trove of Kremlin documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post illustrate the breadth of Russia’s efforts to identify potential recruits.

The documents show that in July 2023, Kremlin political strategists studied the Facebook profiles of more than 1,200 people they believed were workers at two major German plants — Aurubis and BASF in Ludwigshafen — to identify employees who could be manipulated into stirring unrest.

The strategists drew up excel spreadsheets analyzing the profiles of every worker, highlighting posts that demonstrated the employees’ anti-government, anti-immigration or anti-Ukrainian views.

At the BASF chemical plant, special attention was paid to the workers’ attitudes toward the closure of several facilities at the plant in spring 2023 because of soaring production costs, including natural gas price hikes, which led to the loss of 2,600 jobs. At the Aurubis metals plant, the strategists noted anti-immigrant views in the posts of some of the workers, one of the documents shows.

“We can concentrate on inciting ethnic hatred,” one of the strategists wrote. “Or on organizing strikes over social benefits.”

We see more on intelligence targeting in Europe than we do in the US, which is one of many reasons to suspect we know about it because the US has shared information to be released publicly (something they can’t do for US persons). But all that would change if Trump were to win the election: He has already threatened to stop sharing that kind of intelligence.

Trump advisers have told allied countries the reduced intel sharing would be part of a broader plan to scale back U.S. support and cooperation with the 32-nation alliance, according to three European officials and a senior NATO official, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal discussions.

The officials said they learned about the proposal to curb intelligence-sharing during discussions with Trump advisers about broader plans to reduce U.S. involvement with NATO. The former president repeatedly questioned and sought to undercut the alliance during his first term in office.

The curtailment of intel could have dire security consequences, especially for Ukraine as it tries to repel the Russian invasion.

“It’s the American intelligence that helped convince a lot of NATO countries that Putin was resolved to invade Ukraine,” one European official said. “Some countries didn’t believe Russia had the capabilities to carry out a successful military campaign.”

Which brings us to Viktor Orbán’s shenanigans.

Hungary just started serving a six-month term as President of the EU. No sooner had Hungary adopted that position than Orbán promptly used it to fly around the world seeking to do Vladimir Putin’s bidding.

In a leaked letter seen Tuesday by POLITICO, the Hungarian prime minister underlined Russian President Vladimir Putin’s maximalist position on Ukraine so thoroughly he could have been auditioning for the role of Kremlin spokesperson.

The missive, addressed to European Council President Charles Michel and shared with other members of the European Council, lays out Putin’s thinking about the status of his war in Ukraine — and what Orbán reckons the EU’s next steps should be.

It caps a week of manic diplomacy, during which Orbán visited Kyiv, then Moscow, and then Beijing, on a self-described Ukraine “peace mission” days after Hungary assumed command of the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU.

Orbán told Michel that, according to Putin, “time is not on the side of Ukraine, but on the side of the Russian forces,” without providing evidence for the battlefield analysis.

Having largely blown off Biden at the NATO summit, Orbán heads to Mar-a-Lago today to pitch this “peace” deal.

A person familiar with Trump’s plans said the former president was scheduled to stay in Florida until Friday, at which point he would fly to Philadelphia for a rally, and that there was “no time even hypothetically” to meet with Orbán afterwards. That left Thursday as the only day that Orbán could fly down to meet with the Republican candidate.

Trump would also be wary of Orbán trying to position himself as a power broker in Europe, the person said. Bloomberg News reported that Trump had not asked Orbán to negotiate the peace deal for him.

Orbán has not had an official meeting with Biden for the past four years but met Trump in March this year at his beachfront compound in Mar-a-Lago. Orbán endorsed him several times throughout the past eight years and expressed support, calling him a “man of honor” after Trump was found guilty on 34 counts in a criminal trial.

This all comes after Trump performed like a trained seal at the debate, twice raising the Hunter Biden laptop, repeatedly claiming that Putin wouldn’t have invaded if he had been President, describing speaking to Putin before Putin did invade — and promising to achieve a peace deal before inauguration.

To think that I would, in front of generals and others, say suckers and losers – we have 19 people that said it was never said by me. It was made up by him, just like Russia, Russia, Russia was made up, just like the 51 intelligence agents are made up, just like the new thing with the 16 economists are talking.

It’s the same thing. Fifty-one intelligence agents said that the laptop was Russia disinformation. It wasn’t. That came from his son Hunter. It wasn’t Russia disinformation. He made up the suckers and losers, so he should apologize to me right now.

[snip]

As far as Russia and Ukraine, if we had a real president, a president that knew – that was respected by Putin, he would have never – he would have never invaded Ukraine.

A lot of people are dead right now, much more than people know. You know, they talk about numbers. You can double those numbers, maybe triple those numbers. He did nothing to stop it. In fact, I think he encouraged Russia from going in.

I’ll tell you what happened, he was so bad with Afghanistan, it was such a horrible embarrassment, most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, that when Putin watched that and he saw the incompetence that he should – he should have fired those generals like I fired the one that you mentioned, and so he’s got no love lost. But he should have fired those generals.

No general got fired for the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, Afghanistan, where we left billions of dollars of equipment behind, we lost 13 beautiful soldiers and 38 soldiers were obliterated. And by the way, we left people behind too. We left American citizens behind.

When Putin saw that, he said, you know what? I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my – this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream. The difference is he never would have invaded Ukraine. Never.

Just like Israel would have never been invaded, in a million years, by Hamas. You know why? Because Iran was broke with me. I wouldn’t let anybody do business with them. They ran out of money. They were broke. They had no money for Hamas. They had no money for anything. No money for terror.

[snip]

TRUMP: No, they’re not acceptable. No, they’re not acceptable.

But look, this is a war that never should have started. If we had a leader in this war – he led everybody along. He’s given $200 billion now or more to Ukraine. He’s given $200 billion. That’s a lot of money. I don’t think there’s ever been anything like it. Every time that Zelenskyy comes to this country, he walks away with $60 billion. He’s the greatest salesman ever.

And I’m not knocking him, I’m not knocking anything. I’m only saying, the money that we’re spending on this war, and we shouldn’t be spending, it should have never happened.

I will have that war settled between Putin and Zelenskyy as president-elect before I take office on January 20th. I’ll have that war settled.

People being killed so needlessly, so stupidly, and I will get it settled and I’ll get it settled fast, before I take office.

[snip]

TRUMP: Just going back to Ukraine for one second, we have an ocean separating us. The European nations together have spent $100 billion, or maybe more than that, less than us. Why doesn’t he call them so you got to put up your money like I did with NATO? I got them to put up hundreds of billions of dollars. The secretary general of NATO said Trump did the most incredible job I’ve ever seen. You wouldn’t – they wouldn’t have any – they were going out of business. We were spending – almost 100 percent of the money was – it was paid by us.

He didn’t do that. He is getting all – you got to ask these people to put up the money. We’re over $100 billion more spent, and it has a bigger impact on them, because of location, because we have an ocean in between. You got to ask them.

As far as Israel and Hamas, Israel’s the one that wants to go – he said the only one who wants to keep going is Hamas. Actually, Israel is the one. And you should them go and let them finish the job.

He doesn’t want to do it. He’s become like a Palestinian. But they don’t like him, because he’s a very bad Palestinian. He’s a weak one.

[snip]

And we mentioned the laptop, We mentioned “Russia, Russia, Russia,” “Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine.” And everything he does is a lie. It’s misinformation and disinformation. The “losers and suckers” story that he made up is a total lie on the military. It’s a disgrace.

[snip]

TRUMP: Just to finish what he said, if I might, Russia – they took a lot of land from Bush. They took a lot of land from Obama and Biden. They took no land, nothing from Trump, nothing.

He knew not to do it. He’s not going to play games with me. He knew that. I got along with him very well, but he knew not to play games.

He took nothing from me, but now, he’s going to take the whole thing from this man right here.

That’s a war that should have never started. It would’ve never started ever with me. And he’s going to take Ukraine and, you know, you asked me a question before, would you do this with – he’s got us in such a bad position right now with Ukraine and Russia because Ukraine’s not winning that war.

He said, I will never settle until such time – they’re running out of people, they’re running out of soldiers, they’ve lost so many people. It’s so sad.

They’ve lost so many people and they’ve lost those gorgeous cities with the golden domes that are 1,000-years-old, all because of him and stupid decisions.

Russia would’ve never attacked if I were president.

Trump said he’d get Ukraine settled, and Orbán swooped in, with his plan to “settle” it.

Note, too, how Trump links Hamas and Ukraine (and the slur, Palestinian, here). With both Hamas and Russia, Biden is facing hostage situations — most notably with Evan Gershkoich’s detention — that Trump claims he can solve.

While Trump claims to be wary of following Orbán’s lead, that’s no more credible than his claim to disavow Project 2025, the Heritage-linked project with its own ties to Orbán.

It’s all happening in front of our eyes.

But back to Trump’s campaign plan to use digital microtargeting instead of traditional field. The idea is that Trump is going to focus on people who don’t vote, and after getting people who never turn out to turn out, he’ll then throw his election deniers — people like Christina Bobb, who was indicted in Arizona for her false claims in 2020 — to “protect the vote.”

Scouring precinct-level statistics from the four previous times Trump had competed in Iowa—the primary and general elections in 2016 and 2020—they isolated the most MAGA-friendly pockets of the state. Then, comparing data they’d collected from those areas against the state’s voter file, LaCivita and Wiles found what they were looking for: Some 8,000 of those Iowans they identified as pro-Trump—people who, over the previous seven or eight years, had engaged with Trump’s campaign either physically, digitally, or through the mail—were not even registered to vote. Thousands more who were registered to vote had never participated in a caucus. These were the people who, if converted from sympathizers to supporters, could power Trump’s organization.

[snip]

The RNC under Ronna McDaniel, who chaired the national party from early 2017 until LaCivita’s takeover, had become a frequent target of Trump’s ire. He didn’t like that the party remained neutral in the early stages of the 2024 primary—and he was especially furious that McDaniel commissioned debates among the candidates. But what might have bothered him most was the RNC’s priorities: McDaniel was continuing to pour money into field operations, stressing the need for a massive get-out-the-vote program, but showed little interest in his pet issue of “election integrity.”

“Tell you what,” Trump said to Wiles and LaCivita. “I’ll turn out the vote. You spend that money protecting it.”

The marching orders were clear: Trump’s lieutenants were to dismantle much of the RNC’s existing ground game and divert resources to a colossal new election-integrity program—a legion of lawyers on retainer, hundreds of training seminars for poll monitors nationwide, a goal of 100,000 volunteers organized and assigned to stand watch outside voting precincts, tabulation centers, and even individual drop boxes.

The Atlantic piece is really good for understanding what Wiles and LaCivita claim they’re doing.

But it suffers from a category error, which is believing that Trump is thinking exclusively in terms of electoral victory.

It’s all happening in front of our eyes.

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Natalie Harp: Gatekeeper to the Reich

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I want to unpack a Marc Caputo story about Natalie Harp, who he says is the person who posted the Reich meme video to Trump’s Truth Social account this week.

Trump’s account posted the Reich video on Monday.

On Tuesday, AP identified a troll (which it describes as a “meme creator”), Ramble_Rants, as the source of the video, and a Wikipedia entry on WWI as the source of the Reich image.

At least one of the headlines flashing in the video appears to be text copied verbatim from a Wikipedia entry on World War I: “German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich.”

In one image, the headlines “Border Is Closed” and “15 Million Illegal Aliens Deported” appear above smaller text with the start and end dates of World War I.

The video appears to have been created by a meme creator who goes by the username Ramble_Rants.

The creator, who is part of a group of meme makers that The New York Times reported has previously collaborated with the Trump campaign, posted the video on the social platform X Monday morning.

In a post on X, Ramble_Rants defended the video, arguing it was about “American peace and prosperity.”

Then Media Matters described (as the earlier NYT story also had) that Ramble_Rants is part of a trolling group, led by a guy named Brenden Dilley, that the Trump team has closely integrated with the campaign.

Regardless of the intention behind the video Trump shared, Dilley and his team’s association with the Trump campaign is noteworthy.

Trump and his campaign have repeatedly shared the meme team’s material, and the campaign reportedly “privately communicated with members of the meme team, giving them access and making specific requests for content,” and “in at least one instance … shared behind-the-scenes footage to be used in videos, according to members of the team.” Trump has been photographed with Dilley and reportedly “sent personalized notes to several of the group’s members, thanking them for their work.”

Additionally, Dilley disclosed that the campaign gave him and another member of the meme team a “special” and “exclusive” press credential for the campaign’s Iowa caucuses night, where “you hang out with all these wonderful people, and Don Jr. comes through, and Eric Trump comes through, and pretty much the entire Team Trump comes through.” (Reporting has indicated that several journalists from mainstream publications, including The Washington Post, NBC News, Axios, and Vanity Fair, have been denied press access to Trump’s campaign events.)

What we’re seeing is the War Room in which Douglass Mackey, Microchip, and Don Jr collaborated to hijack mainstream news narratives together in 2016, integrated more closely with the campaign. It’s not surprising Trump did that. Even in 2016, Baked Alaska described a Trump HQ Slack that was “coordinat[ing] efforts.”

Remember: Andrew Auernheimer, better known as Weev, and then still posting under his handle rabite, was a key early player in professionalizing that effort, even as he was serving as Webmaster for the Daily Stormer.

Given that pure Nazi lineage, the Nazi allusions are surely not happenstance.

In a post called Elon Musk’s Machine for Fascism, I described how since 2016, trolls and their overlords have been working to perfect the conditions that allowed such trolls to have a significant influence in the 2016 election and an even bigger influence in Trump’s attempted coup. One of the only things that stopped the trolls, and Trump, from sustaining his coup attempt after January 6 was Twitter suspending Trump’s account. This time around, neither Elon Musk nor Trump’s own social media platform will do that. Nor will Telegram, where the organizing function for all this trolling has moved offshore, away from the easy reach of US legal process, shut anything down.

All of which is to say, the Reich meme is not some random mistake. Rather, it is the manifestation of a trolling effort with roots in overt Neo-Nazism that goes back to 2015.

Which brings us back to what Caputo did in a story identifying Natalie Harp as the person who posted the Reich meme to Trump’s account.

Caputo is a Florida-based journalist with very extensive sourcing to the far right. He was recently on Roger Stone’s show. His legal instincts — pretty clearly just parroting of what Trumpsters tell him to say — suck ass, but his political instincts are formidable.

About 16 paragraphs into his story, after he presented Harp’s role in printing out content from social media and right wing sources to placate the boss, and after he described Harp’s trajectory from Liberty University to being cured of cancer by a Trump initiative to working for the 2020 campaign to working for OANN to now driving his social media account, Caputo finally got around to identifying Harp as the culprit behind the Reich meme.

Harp also helps manage Trump’s Truth Social media account and has taken over some of the duties from Trump’s former caddy-turned-senior-adviser Dan Scavino.

This can be a taxing job. On Monday, while he was on trial in New York, Trump’s Truth Social media account reposted a video, published first on X by a supporter using the handle @ramble_rants, called “What happens after Trump wins?” The video featured mock old-fashioned newspaper headlines. One of the sepia-toned faux-newspaper stock images included the phrase “Unified Reich.” Maybe not the best look for a candidate who has dined with actual neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and “joked” that he would like to be a dictator for a day.

After the Associated Press reported about the video, the Trump campaign deleted the Truth Social post and said Trump wasn’t at fault.

“This was not a campaign video, it was created by a random account online and reposted by a junior staffer who clearly did not see the word, while the President was in court,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a written statement that accused Democrats of being more antisemitic than Trump. The campaign wouldn’t identify the name of that “junior staffer,” but sources tell The Bulwark it was Harp. Scavino, one of the few others who has access to Trump’s Truth Social account, isn’t a “junior staffer.” Harp couldn’t be reached for comment.

In most outlets, this would be the scoop, in paragraph one and two, rather than buried 16 paragraphs deep. But that’s not the premise of Caputo’s story. That’s not what a political reporter with very good sourcing in the Florida far right focuses on. Caputo is more interested in Harp’s role as a gatekeeper, which he puts in paragraphs four and five.

Perhaps more than anyone else, Harp gatekeeps much of what Trump sees on social media and reads in the news.

“IF YOU WANT THE PRESIDENT TO SEE SOMETHING, the best route is Natalie,” says a knowledgeable source who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the internal workings of Trump’s inner team and who has passed information to the candidate via Harp. “Don’t underestimate her importance.”

Caputo is not wrong to find this an important point of emphasis (though some people contest it). Dan Scavino has had a near monopoly on Trump’s social media accounts since 2016. Anyone joining him in that role does play an absolutely central role in his means to power. And to the extent that Trump has moved off reading things on his own phone and instead reading what Harp prints out (is Trump’s eyesight getting worse, or is he simply more paranoid?), she does play an absolutely central gatekeeping role.

Dick Cheney’s memoir included a single solitary hint about the lessons he learned, not least as a very young White House Chief of Staff, that allowed him to become the most formidable DC bureaucrat for almost 50 years: to park someone outside the President’s office. Effectively, Harp is the person parked outside Trump’s digital office.

Caputo’s story, then, is that the woman who posted a meme that was interpreted — with good reason — as an intentional allusion to Nazism happens to be the person parked outside Trump’s digital office.

Harp’s key role may be why Caputo described posting that Reich meme as nothing more than, “Maybe not the best look.” Because she’s not going to get fired for doing so.

All the more so for another reason. Around about paragraph 21, Caputo describes that Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita “don’t directly oversee Harp and … essentially leave her alone.”

“No one spends as much time on this campaign around him as Natalie,” said one insider. “If people think she’s an airhead because of her looks, they don’t understand how smart she is and how much the president relies on her.”

The campaign’s co-managers, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, don’t directly oversee Harp and, the source said, and essentially leave her alone.

“Natalie fills a role and Chris and Susie know that’s what he wants,” the source said, “so they focus on other things.”

Again, if true (it appears to be single sourced), it is a really important insight: Trump’s digital gatekeeper doesn’t work for the ostensible campaign managers. The campaign — which serially offers statements in response to reporting on Project 2025 claiming that unless something comes from the campaign then it is not official policy — does not control Harp.

Caputo’s source claims that the campaign doesn’t control what comes in and out of Trump’s digital persona. Harp does.

And people amenable to fascism know that, and know how to exploit it.

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